Wars

Has World War 3 already begun?

The Great War

World War I, the Great War, ushered in a fully loaded and mechanically equipped modernity. A war of attrition, hundreds of thousands of young men would die upon muddy fields, their bodies rotting with the stench of gunpowder, various gases and excrements. Though estimates appear hard to come by, somewhere between 16 and 18 million people died as a result of the whims of a power hungry elite. The effigies of this war exist everywhere, and yearly, people pay their respects to the grand entrance and reality of the modern war. However, their memory is not the living memory, and with a century past, it is easy to forget that, rather than nations doing battle, it was young men, scared, anointed, who might have listened for an evening to the screams and pleads for mercy of their fallen friend caught in a barbed wire entanglement. To help him meant their own death, because there were reasons he was left alive by “the enemy” … so they listened, too afraid to kill one of their own yet they wished for a quickening of his passing. They wished he would just die already.

WWII

An extension of the Great War, World War ll signals the maturity of uncompromising rationality. Between 60 million and 80 million people die as a result of the conflict. Final solutions are settled upon, people rounded up, systematically processed and dispatched. Unlike the attrition warfare of the previous Great War, this would be a war predicated upon technological supremacy. Bombs are dropped upon populations without any knowledge of what might happen to them, while other populations are firebombed into nothingness. Civilian casualties during WWII outnumber the military dead. The New York Times reads: “First Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan: Missile is Equal to 20,000 tons of TNT; Truman Warns Foe of a ‘Rain of Ruin.’:” When victory is pronounced people dance in the streets, celebrate, chanting peace.